We started the day off with our complimentary breakfast at the home stay. After breakfast we walked into town again to purchase our tickets to see the sights in the old town area.

120 000 VND per person $6CAD? gets you a ticket to enter 5 of the 21 sites in the Old Town city centre. This ticket can be purchased from a building along the waterfront, close to the Japanese covered bridge. The sites included are a mixture of tombs, traditional houses, monuments, museums and assembly halls. We enjoyed the assembly halls the most, and chose to go into four different halls as well as the Japanese Covered Bridge.

My favourite part about the Assembly Halls were the beautiful red spiraling incense coils hanging from the ceiling. It takes months of constant burning for these giant coils to burn out! Individuals and businesses can purchase the incense coils and donate them to the assembly hall as a sort of offering. The smell of all the coils burning was incredible, but watch out for falling ash from the ceiling!! I also loved the plants and gardens throughout the assembly halls. You might say I have a thing for plants…..

After our wander around the sights in Old Town Hoi An, we returned to our hostel to borrow bicycles. We intended to bike to the beach, but got a bit lost! Along the way we discovered rice fields and got to see a more rural area of Vietnam.

We eventually did find the beach, and found a place to park our bikes. We bought two cans of ice cold beer and plunked ourselves down in the sand to drink and look out over the Pacific Ocean!! A truly perfect moment…… and then a lady pestered us to buy necklaces in a relentless way like I’ve never experienced before. Magical.

…it’s a good necklace.

We headed back into town for first AND second dinner. We started with some sauteed veggies and spring rolls at the first restaurant. The food was so good that I only have an after photo to show for it……

Our second dinner was the highly recommended Country Pancakes and a Fish and Veggie Stew. We each got a massive mug of “fresh beer” as well.

Country Pancakes are like a omelet mixed with a spring roll. You assemble your own rolls by adding egg omelet and greens to a rice paper sheet that you’ve submerged in water. You then roll up the mixture in the rice paper and dunk it in the spicy sauce. We cannot recommend this meal enough!!

After dinner we walked around the street’s of old town looking for a bar that Jives had read about, “Guitar Hawaii”. There was an ever changing band playing covers of classic rock hits and Vietnamese music. They offered to allow Jives to play with them. They seemed to be open to people joining in and influencing the direction that the music would take.

Sadly I was feeling incredibly unwell, and we returned to the hotel sooner than we would have liked.